Yes. I don’t expect Trump to finish the term. 2026 would be my guess for the most likely year, but each of 2027 and 2028 is almost equally likely, and there’s even some chance it could still happen before the end of 2025.
He’s acting erratic and weird (more than usual and increasingly). It may not be possible to prop him up for very long. Or at least it may be very hard, and it’s not clear that the people who’d have to do that are agreed on the need to try that hard.
His political coalition is under tremendous pressure. He’s unpopular, he keeps making unpopular moves, and there doesn’t seem to be any power base he’s not prepared to alienate. It’s hard to gauge how much all that is straining things, because you often don’t see any cracks until the whole thing suddenly collapses. The way collapse looks from the outside is probably that one of his many scandals, missteps, and whatnot suddenly sticks, a few key people or groups visibly abandon him, that signals everybody else, and it quickly snowballs into impeachment and removal.
He’s at risk of assassination. A whole lot of people, including crazy people, are very, very mad at him. A whole lot of others might just coldly think it’s a good idea for him to die for a variety of reasons. Including the desire to substitute Vance as president, in fact. He’s random, reckless, autocratic, and fast-moving enough to foreclose many non-assassination alternatives that might normally keep the thought out of people’s minds. Security isn’t perfect and he’s probably not always a cooperative protectee.
He’s almost 80, which means he has a several percent chance of dying in any given year regardless.
* This is not a parliamentary system. The President doesn’t get booted from office when they lose majority support—they have to be impeached[1]. * Successful impeachment takes 67 Senate votes. * 25 states (half of Senate seats) voted for Trump 3 elections in a row (2016, 2020, 2024). * So to impeach Trump, you’d need the votes of Senators from at least 9 states where Trump won 3 elections in a row. * Betting markets expect (70% chance) Republicans to keep their 50 seats majority in the November Election, not a crash in support.
The thing is that impeachment is still political, and Trump is a big pain in the butt for the Republicans at the moment. I’d guess that if they could individually, secretly push a button and make Trump resign in favor of Vance, 80 percent of Republicans in Congress would push that button right now.
Trump is making 2026 hard. Maybe they keep those 50 seats, by whatever means… and maybe they don’t. Maybe he does something insane in October 2026, maybe he doesn’t. People, including very right wing working class people they think of as the MAGA base, keep yelling at them all the time. He’s pulling less and less of his own weight in terms of pulling in votes. There’s the even the possibility of massive civil unrest, general strikes, whatever.
But maybe more importantly, Trump’s just generally a pain to work with or near. You can’t plan, you keep having to publicly reverse yourself when he tells you one of your positions is no longer OK, you have to grin and bear it when he insults you, your family, and your constituents. He gets wild ideas and breaks things at random, things that weren’t in the plan. You can’t make a bargain with him and expect him to keep up his end if there’s any meaningful cost to him in doing so. If you’re sincerely religious, he does a bunch of stuff that’s pretty hard to swallow.
If Trump reaches the point of, say, literally being unable to speak a single coherent sentence, then maybe some of the pain of working with him goes away, because you’re really working with whoever can manage to puppet him. But then you have to fear power struggles over the puppet strings, and there’s also a very large workload in maintaining any kind of facade.
Vance, on the other hand, is just as acceptable to most of the Republicans policy-wise as Trump is, maybe more so. I think he’s more in the Thielite or Moldbugger wing and less of a xenophobe or religious fanatic, but he’s not going to have any objections to working with xenophobes or religious fanatics, or to negotiating due attention for their priorities on terms acceptable to them. He’s more predictable, easier to work with and bargain with.
It’s a win for the Republicans if they can, say, throw Trump under the bus over something like Epstein, show their independence and “moral fiber”, install Vance and let him play the savior, tone down some of the more obvious attacks on norms (while still rapidly eroding any inconvenient ones), and stay on more or less the same substantive policy course (except with fewer weird random digressions).
That doesn’t necessarily translate into a 67-percent vote; there’s a huge coordination problem. And it’s not at all clear that Democrats are better off with Vance. On the other hand, probably nearly all of them personally hate Trump, and they know that holding out for, say, a Trump-Vance double impeachment won’t do them a lot of good. They won’t get it, and if they did get it they’d just end up with Mike Johnson. They might even get more competent appointments, if not more ideologically acceptable ones. So they don’t have a strong incentive to gum up an impeachment if the Republicans want to do one.
...your modal estimate for the timing of Vance ascending to the presidency is more than two years before Trump’s term ends?
Yes. I don’t expect Trump to finish the term. 2026 would be my guess for the most likely year, but each of 2027 and 2028 is almost equally likely, and there’s even some chance it could still happen before the end of 2025.
He’s acting erratic and weird (more than usual and increasingly). It may not be possible to prop him up for very long. Or at least it may be very hard, and it’s not clear that the people who’d have to do that are agreed on the need to try that hard.
His political coalition is under tremendous pressure. He’s unpopular, he keeps making unpopular moves, and there doesn’t seem to be any power base he’s not prepared to alienate. It’s hard to gauge how much all that is straining things, because you often don’t see any cracks until the whole thing suddenly collapses. The way collapse looks from the outside is probably that one of his many scandals, missteps, and whatnot suddenly sticks, a few key people or groups visibly abandon him, that signals everybody else, and it quickly snowballs into impeachment and removal.
He’s at risk of assassination. A whole lot of people, including crazy people, are very, very mad at him. A whole lot of others might just coldly think it’s a good idea for him to die for a variety of reasons. Including the desire to substitute Vance as president, in fact. He’s random, reckless, autocratic, and fast-moving enough to foreclose many non-assassination alternatives that might normally keep the thought out of people’s minds. Security isn’t perfect and he’s probably not always a cooperative protectee.
He’s almost 80, which means he has a several percent chance of dying in any given year regardless.
Would you agree your take is rather contrarian?
* This is not a parliamentary system. The President doesn’t get booted from office when they lose majority support—they have to be impeached[1].
* Successful impeachment takes 67 Senate votes.
* 25 states (half of Senate seats) voted for Trump 3 elections in a row (2016, 2020, 2024).
* So to impeach Trump, you’d need the votes of Senators from at least 9 states where Trump won 3 elections in a row.
* Betting markets expect (70% chance) Republicans to keep their 50 seats majority in the November Election, not a crash in support.
Or removed by the 25th amendment, which is strictly harder if the president protests (requires 2⁄3 vote to remove in both House and Senate).
Maybe.
The thing is that impeachment is still political, and Trump is a big pain in the butt for the Republicans at the moment. I’d guess that if they could individually, secretly push a button and make Trump resign in favor of Vance, 80 percent of Republicans in Congress would push that button right now.
Trump is making 2026 hard. Maybe they keep those 50 seats, by whatever means… and maybe they don’t. Maybe he does something insane in October 2026, maybe he doesn’t. People, including very right wing working class people they think of as the MAGA base, keep yelling at them all the time. He’s pulling less and less of his own weight in terms of pulling in votes. There’s the even the possibility of massive civil unrest, general strikes, whatever.
But maybe more importantly, Trump’s just generally a pain to work with or near. You can’t plan, you keep having to publicly reverse yourself when he tells you one of your positions is no longer OK, you have to grin and bear it when he insults you, your family, and your constituents. He gets wild ideas and breaks things at random, things that weren’t in the plan. You can’t make a bargain with him and expect him to keep up his end if there’s any meaningful cost to him in doing so. If you’re sincerely religious, he does a bunch of stuff that’s pretty hard to swallow.
If Trump reaches the point of, say, literally being unable to speak a single coherent sentence, then maybe some of the pain of working with him goes away, because you’re really working with whoever can manage to puppet him. But then you have to fear power struggles over the puppet strings, and there’s also a very large workload in maintaining any kind of facade.
Vance, on the other hand, is just as acceptable to most of the Republicans policy-wise as Trump is, maybe more so. I think he’s more in the Thielite or Moldbugger wing and less of a xenophobe or religious fanatic, but he’s not going to have any objections to working with xenophobes or religious fanatics, or to negotiating due attention for their priorities on terms acceptable to them. He’s more predictable, easier to work with and bargain with.
It’s a win for the Republicans if they can, say, throw Trump under the bus over something like Epstein, show their independence and “moral fiber”, install Vance and let him play the savior, tone down some of the more obvious attacks on norms (while still rapidly eroding any inconvenient ones), and stay on more or less the same substantive policy course (except with fewer weird random digressions).
That doesn’t necessarily translate into a 67-percent vote; there’s a huge coordination problem. And it’s not at all clear that Democrats are better off with Vance. On the other hand, probably nearly all of them personally hate Trump, and they know that holding out for, say, a Trump-Vance double impeachment won’t do them a lot of good. They won’t get it, and if they did get it they’d just end up with Mike Johnson. They might even get more competent appointments, if not more ideologically acceptable ones. So they don’t have a strong incentive to gum up an impeachment if the Republicans want to do one.